Biography:
Yakimenko was born on May, 27, 1971 in Lyubertsy in Moscow region. When serving in the Army he dealt with radiotelegraphy.
In 1994 he graduated from the evening department of the State University of Management and then from the Moscow State Social University in 2002.
In 1992 he co-founded LLP Tandem Ros.
In 1993 he headed LLP Vento
In 1994 he founded LLP Akbars.
In 1999 he became the director of Music of lying band.
In March 2000 he organized a demonstration of prostitutes to support the dismissed Attorney General, Yuri Skuratov.
From March to May 2000 he headed the department for relations with civil society organizations in internal politics division of the Presidential Administration.
In May 2000 he established the organization called Walking Together.
On April, 15, 2005 at the Exhibition Center in Moscow he held “The First All-Russian Congress of the Youth Democratic Antifascist Movement Nashi”. At the Congress he was elected one of the five commissioners of the federal movement.
On April, 15, 2006 he was re-elected to the Federal Council of the Nashi movement.
On October, 8, 2007 he was appointed Chairman of the State Committee for Youth Affairs.
Since May 2008 he has been head of the Federal Agency on Youth Affairs in the Ministry of Sports, Youth, and Tourism, the minister of which is Vitaly Mutko.
Yakemenko loves classical music, playing the guitar, and table tennis.
He is married. According a 2007 report, he had two sons: one from his first marriage and one from the second. In 2009 the press mentioned several sons. In 2009 the under aged children owned two12 hundred square metres plots of land, three apartments, a house, and an Audi Q5. According to the tax return as of 01 January 2010, Yakemenko’s wife, Maria Soboleva, is unemployed. In 2010 she was Federal Agency for Youth Affairs consultant in the Run with me project.
Source: Wikipedia
Dossier:
In 1994 Vasily Yakimenko co-founded LLP Akbars with five members of a criminal gang 29th district, headquartered in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny. Currently the five men are serving prison sentences for racketeering, organization of a criminal group, kidnapping, and murder.
When in 2010 this information came through, the spokesman to Yakemenko and Nashi movement, Christina Potupchik, said that criminals used data from Yakemenko’s passport without him knowing that, and that he had nothing to do with Akbars company.
Source: Grani.ru, 23 March 2011
Criminal group 29th district, which existed from 1993 to 2001, got its name from the residential district number in Naberezhnye Chelny, where its leader, Adygan Salyakhov, who later he moved to Moscow, lived.
In the nineties Salyakhov’s gang consisted of about a thousand people and it controlled several banks, a number of districts of Tatarstan, the Southern Port of Odessa, and marketing of almost half of KAMAZ produce. Criminals were notorious for their cruelty. They beheaded those businessmen who refused to pay tribute and cremated the corpses. In 2006 the Supreme Court of Tatarstan sentenced 32 members of the gang. Their sentences combined, they received 400 years in prison for racketeering, organization of a criminal group, kidnapping, and 14 murders.
LLP Akbars was founded in Moscow in 1994 by several people. Salyakhov owned 23.26% of the stake. Vasily Yakimenko, Alexander Vlasov, Nail Nuriahmetov, and Rosil Rakhmatullin each controlled 18.69%, and Yuri Yeremenko owned 1.86%. Later Yeremenko received a life sentence over 29th district case, and Salyakhov was sentenced to 25 years in a high-security prison.
It is still not clear what exactly did LLP Akbars deal in. According to Nuriakhmetov’s words, it dealt in trading KAMAZ automobiles. "To put KAMAZ JSC under criminal control, the gang members terrorized some managers of the entity, some of whom were brutally beaten ... In the end, the inability of law enforcement agencies to protect the entity management from criminal group 29th district resulted in the alliance between the police and the group ... KAMAZ football club was controlled by the criminals, which allowed to get KAMAZ trucks at a give-away price. Businessmen who had no legal protection from the police were forced to seek protection from the criminal group and to pay money for it”, says the case file against the 29th district criminal group.
Source: Wikipedia, 08 April 2011
In 1999 an open letter by Director of Music of lying, Yakemenko V.G. was published for publicity purposes. The letter accused certain supporters of Primakov that on December, 3, 1999 they beat Yakemenko in the entryway of his house causing him a closed craniocerebral injury.
According to Yakemenko, the reason for the beating was the song Old Stuff by his band that said something about an "old kerosene stove” which Primakov’s supporters took for insinuation on their idol.
Source: Izvestia, 13 December 2003
On September, 10, 2002, in its article about Vasily Yakimenko Moskovsky Komsomolets news paper reported that he was the founder of Akbars. At that time Yakemenko did not demand any denials of this information.
Source: MK, 29 November 2010
In 2002 the movement Walking Together carried out a number of rallies to exchange "harmful" books by Pelevin, Sorokin, and Marx. The movement's leader, Vasily Yakimenko, at first pretended to be offended by the mass media criticism of books exchange campaign. But it was obvious that he was pleased with attention from the media. "All the publications have convinced us that we are moving in the right direction."
Yakemenko promised to draw a new list of "harmful" books, but he did not specify which ones. In response to a question about the fate of the books by another "harmful" writer, Viktor Yerofeyev, Yakemenko called Yerofeyev a failure, thereby explaining why the writer was not on the list.
The leader of Walking Together identified participation of the movement’s members in the book exchange campaign as half-mandatory. But then he added that if someone in his organization considered Pelevin a good writer, that person “was free to leave”.
Source: Kommersant, № 21 (2390), 07 February 2002
According to former deputy prime minister of Chechnya region, Lecho Salegov, in 2005 up to 50% of the profits from oil extraction did not reach the budget but instead filled the pockets of the republic leaders and some senior officials in Moscow. Among people directly involved in the mentioned situation there were Vladislav Surkov, Mikhail Fridman, Peter Aven, and Roman Abramovich. Another 500 thousand dollars of the oil money were monthly transferred to Vasily Yakemenko (who, according to some sources, is a relative of Surkov on the mother’s side) to finance various kinds of youth campaigns and movements like Walking Together or Nashi. The purpose of these movements was to become controlled not by the Russian president, but by Vladislav Surkov.
Source: Forum.msk.ru, 21 December 2005
The media reported that Oleg Kashin told the story of him and Ilya Yashin disguised as representatives from the regions went to the congress of Nashi which took place in a sanatorium in the Moscow region in March 2005. They were exposed, seized, and detained in a room until the arrival of Yakemenko who instructed his security to beat Yashin. According to Kashin, Yakemenko gestured to beat "this one like this and that one like that." His people understood the instructions literally and took Yashin outside, pushed him into the snow, and began to beat.
Also, according to Kashin, in August 2005 criminals beat the representatives of an opposition youth movement, who had a meeting at the Avtozavodskaya metro station, with baseball bats. Law enforcement officers detained and registered the attackers. Reporters got hold of this list. Among the attackers there were members of Nashi movement, including Roman Verbitsky, leader of a voluntary youth group, that is, the public power branch of Nashi.
Source: Moskovsky Komsomolets number 25547, 19 January 2011
Roman Verbitsky’s name first appeared in the press in the summer of 2005 when activists of the banned National Bolshevik Party were beaten in Moscow. The victims said the attackers were members of the Nashi movement and that they were headed by Verbitsky, a.k.a. Roma Spiky. Roman Verbitsky described the accusations as a desire to get public attention at the expense of others.
He acknowledged that he was leader of the voluntary youth group of the Nashi. According to him, the voluntary youth squads operate in 19 regions and comprise 5-6 thousand people. Their main activity is patrolling the streets together with law enforcement authorities.
Apparently, these groups guarded the Nashi movement’s event. Silent people in black can be seen during any major campaign of the movement. Moscow police replied to media inquiries that the official law enforcement agencies did not know who these people were.
Source: Novaya Gazeta № 18, 17 March 2008
In March 2006 the Kremlin planned to conduct an anti-fascist campaign by Nashi. The movement's leader, Vasily Yakemenko, intended to pool 100 thousand supporters to Moscow.
The rally was canceled. The official reason was that the movement fell behind with the schedule. But it became known that the reason was actually the lack of money. To carry out Yakimenko’s large-scale campaign the Kremlin, or rather, the supervisor of Nashi, Vladislav Surkov, allocated $ 3 million. But it was not enough for Yakemenko.
Source: Zhizn, 14 March 2006
In January 2010 Nashi movement commissioner, Anastasia Korchevskaya, posted in her life journal account a photograph of her with Yakemenko. Caption reads "Seliger-2008. Yakemenko still thinks I'm madly in love with him." Yakemenko replied "Korchevskaya, if you twice came to my tent for the night, that is, once a year, and we had something going on, it does not mean that I think you're in love with me. Got it?"
Later Korchevskaya deleted the post, but bloggers kept the screenshots. According to some sources, Anastasia Korchevskaya graduated from high school in 2010.
At the end of 2010 a video, in which a minor girl claimed she had sexual intercourse with the head Federal Agency On Youth Affairs, appeared in the Internet on YouTube. In this video a girl who went to the Seliger camp organized by Nashi and Federal Agency On Youth Affairs, spoke about her affair with Vasily Yakemenko.
Source: Moskovsky Komsomolets, 26 August 2010
When commenting on the media publications about his relationships with minors, Vasily Yakemenko said he did not share the opinion that "sex with minors is wrong" "First of all, minors are not listed as endangered species, and second, I did not do it from a helicopter" - he said.
Source: Novaya Gazeta, 03 September 2010
On November, 6, Oleg Kashin, reporter for the Kommersant news agency, was attacked in the centre of Moscow on Pyatnitskaya Street. Doctors recorded a severe brain trauma and multiple fractures.
The criminal case over the attack on Kashin was reclassified under the article on attempted murder by a group of people. Yuri Chaika, the Attorney General, supervised the case investigation. Previously, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev instructed Yuri Chaika and Interior Minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, to supervise the case.
Source: Svoboda news, 06 November 2010
After Oleg Kashin having been beaten in 2010, former head of Interpol of Russia, Vladimir Ovchinsky, told about the methods that the KGB in USSR used in “the ideological sector "and immediately mentioned minister Yakemenko. "I was strongly impressed by the presence of a minister named Yakemenko in the Russian government. Twenty-odd years ago, I knew him as one of the most active participants in the Lyubertsy criminal group", said General Ovchinsky.
Source: corrupcia.net, 05 Janiary 2011
On November, 22, 2010 activists of the Moscow division of Youth Yabloko held a picket requesting that the head of Federal Agency on Youth Affairs, Vasily Yakemenko, resigned as head of the Federal Agency and apologized to the beaten journalist Kashin and his friends, whom he accused of blood-related PR.
In addition the Youth Yabloko suspected head of the Federal Agency On Youth Affairs of having connections with gunmen and football fans like Roman Verbitsky and Vasily Stepanov. These people allegedly could have been involved in the brutal attack on Oleg Kashin. The protesters “kindly asked” Yakemenko to come to the police for questioning over a high-profile case and tell about his friendship with "shady persons".
Source: corrupcia.net, 23 November 2010
On March 23, 2011, Kashin wrote in his online journal that he found it possible that Yakemenko had something to do with the attack. "I do not doubt Yakemenko’s version of the events and I have no other versions but I think that my case is not so difficult to investigate and the silence of the Investigating Committee, in my opinion, favours such a conclusion", said Kashin in a blog.
Source: NEWSru.com, 04 April 2011
In March 2011 the media reported that head of the Federal Agency On Youth Affairs, Vasily Yakemenko, filed a lawsuit against Oleg Kashin. Yakemenko required recognizing the information about his involvement in an attack on Kashin defamatory and untrue, and he also is seeking compensation for moral damage. Kashin said he was prepared to go to court. "I have no doubt in the version [of Yakemenko being involved in the attack]. However, there is one important point. I called the Hamovnichesky court office and they know nothing about the lawsuit," claimed the journalist.
Source: Kommersant FM, 04 April 2011
In spring 2011 the Investigations Division of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny reported that Vasily Yakemenko was involved in the activities of Akbars which, in turn, was linked to upcriminal group 29th district. It has been established that the politician knows founders of the company and that Yakemenko worked in the copmany. During the interrogation, one of the founders of the Akbars, Nail Nuriakhmetov, told the investigators that Vasily Yakimenko had come to the office of the firm, worked at Akbars for about six months, “doing paperwork”.
Source: Spravedlivost, 23 March 2011
In the office of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi journalists found pens with logo of Akbars company associated with the brutal criminal group and the founder of Nashi, the head Federal Agency On Youth Affairs, Vasily Yakemenko. Link between the two was previously confirmed by an investigation official.
Source: Lenizdat.ru, 15 April 2011